Rainforest QA Named a Cool Vendor in Application Development by Gartner

It started with a simple question. “What problem do you have that you’d pay $1,000 a month to solve?”

That’s the question Rainforest CEO Fred Stevens-Smith asked friendly CEOs and Y Combinator startup founders when he and CTO Russell Smith set out to design Rainforest. The nearly unanimous outcry for a better, faster QA solution led Fred and Russell to start building the Rainforest platform, leveraging thousands of testers to test web applications and deliver feedback in about 30 minutes.

Four years later, we’re excited to share that Rainforest QA was selected as a Cool Vendor in Application Development for 2016 by Gartner. The report offers an overview of recent innovations in the application development and highlights vendors who are taking a fresh approach to solving the problems that developers face. Taking Rainforest from a novel idea for QA-as-a-Service that — as Fred put it — “doesn’t sound like a good idea,” to being recognized by Gartner as an innovator in application development indicates that Rainforest is driving QA practices forward.

Among other recommendations for best practices in application development, the Gartner Cool Vendor report suggests that organizations should focus on finding a balance between creating a consolidated development strategy and effectively leveraging best-of-breed tools like Rainforest. From larger companies with complex teams like Zenefits, to small startups like Librato that develop at break-neck speeds, customers are using the Rainforest platform to tap into the potential of a crowdsourced workforce for their testing needs.

Gartner’s profile highlights how Rainforest leverages crowdsourced human testers to execute large sets of manual QA tests at the speed of automation. This allows companies to effectively adopt fast-paced development practices including continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment, without sacrificing rigorous quality testing standards. The report notes that beyond speeding up testing to keep pace with continuous deployment, Rainforest gives companies the benefit of leveraging human testers to test their UI. As a result, the feedback gathered from Rainforest test results can be valuable for improving UX.

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